The Accident

ELEVEN

Sheila’s mother, Fiona Kingston, was never a fan of mine. Sheila’s death only served to reinforce that opinion.

Right from the outset, she’d believed her daughter could have done better. Way better. Fiona never came right out and said it, at least not to me. But I was always aware she thought her daughter should have ended up with someone like her own husband-her first husband-the late Ronald Albert Gallant. Noted and successful lawyer. Respected member of the community. Sheila’s father.

Ron died when Sheila was only eleven, but his influence persisted. He was the gold standard by which all prospective suitors for Fiona’s daughter were measured. Even before she’d reached her twenties, when the boys she went out with were unlikely to become lifelong companions, Sheila was subjected to intense interrogations about them from Fiona. What did their parents do? What clubs did these boys belong to? How well were they doing in school? What were their SAT scores? What were their ambitions?

Sheila had only had her father for eleven years, but she knew what she remembered about him most. She remembered that there wasn’t much to remember. He was rarely home. He devoted his life to his work, not his family. When he was home, he was remote and distant.

Sheila wasn’t sure that was the kind of man she wanted. She loved her father, and was devastated to lose him at such a young age. But there wasn’t the void in her life she might have expected.

Once Fiona’s husband was dead-a heart attack at forty-whatever tenderness she might have had as a mother, and there was never that much to begin with, was displaced by the burden of running a household solo. Ronald Albert Gallant had left his wife and daughter well fixed, but Fiona had never managed the household finances and it took her a while, with the help of various lawyers and accountants and banking officials, to figure everything out. But once she had it all down, she became consumed with overseeing her business affairs, investing wisely, studying her quarterly financial statements.

She still had time, however, to run her daughter’s life.

Fiona didn’t take it well when her little girl, whom she’d sent to Yale to become a lawyer or a titan of industry, who with any luck should fall in love with some high-powered attorney-in-training, met the man of her dreams not in law class arguing the finer points of torts, but in the ivy-draped building’s hallways working for his father’s company, installing new windows. Maybe, had Sheila not met me, she would have completed her schooling, but I’m not so sure. Sheila liked to be out in the world, doing things, not sitting in a classroom listening to someone pontificate on matters she didn’t give a rat’s ass about.

The irony was, of the two of us, I was the one with the degree. My parents had sent me north to Bates, in Lewiston, Maine, where I’d majored in English for reasons that now elude me. It wasn’t exactly the sort of degree that had prospective employers begging you to submit a resume. When I graduated, I couldn’t think of a thing I wanted to do with my piece of paper. I didn’t want to teach. And while I liked to write, I didn’t have the Great American Novel in me. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to read another one, at least for a while. I’d had Faulkner and Hemingway and Melville up to here.

That fucking whale. I never did finish that book.

But despite that piece of paper, I belonged to that class of people who were invisible to Fiona. I was an ant, a worker bee, one of the faceless millions who kept the world running smoothly and whom, thankfully, you didn’t have to spend a lot of face time with. Fiona probably appreciated, on some level, that there were people to build and renovate houses, just as she was pleased there were others who picked up the trash every week. She lumped me in with the folks who cleared out her gutters and cut her lawn-when she still had her big house-and tuned her Caddy and fixed her toilet when it wouldn’t stop running, even if you jiggled the handle. It didn’t seem to matter to her that I had my own company-granted, it had been handed down to me by my father-or that I employed several people, had a reputation as a reliable contractor, did okay for myself, that I was not only able to put a roof over my, my wife’s, and my daughter’s heads, but that I was able to build the damn roof myself. The only person who worked with his hands who might impress Fiona would be the latest darling of the gallery crowd, some twenty-first-century answer to Jackson Pollock whose paint-stained trousers were evidence of talent and eccentricity, not just of trying to make a living.

I’d had clients like Fiona over the years. They were the ones who wouldn’t shake your hand, afraid their soft palms might get scratched by your calluses.

Since I’d first met Fiona, I’d had a hard time getting my head around the fact that Sheila was really her daughter. While there was a physical resemblance, in every other way the two women were different. Fiona cared deeply about maintaining the status quo. That translated into protecting tax breaks for the wealthy, praying that same-sex marriage never became legalized, and double life sentences for petty thefts.

Fiona’s horror at Sheila marrying me was matched only by her disdain for her daughter’s occasional volunteer work at a legal aid clinic and the time she spent volunteering on Democratic senator Chris Dodd’s campaigns.

“Do you do it because you really care? Or because you know it drives your mother nuts?” I asked her once.

“Because I care,” Sheila answered. “Driving Mother nuts is just a bonus.”

The first year we were married, Sheila told me, “Mother’s a bully. I’ve learned over the years the only thing you can do is to stand up to her. You’ll never know the things she said to me when I told her I was marrying you. But you have to know the most hurtful things she said were not about you, Glen. They were about me. For the choices I’ve made. Well, I’m proud of those choices. And of the ones you’ve made, too.”

I had chosen to build things. Decks, garages, additions, entire houses. After graduation, I sought employment at my father’s contracting company, where I’d worked every summer since I was sixteen.

“I’m gonna need references,” he’d said when I walked into his office right after college, when I was twenty-two.

I loved what I did. I pitied friends who spent their days sitting in cubicle prisons, who went home after eight hours unable to point to a single thing they’d accomplished. But I made buildings. Things you could point to as you drove down the street. And I was building them with my father, I was learning from him every day. A couple of years after I started working with him, I met Sheila on that window job, and before long we’d moved in together, something that didn’t sit well with my parents any more than it did with Fiona. But two years later we stopped living in sin, as my own mother liked to call it, in part because Mom was dying of cancer, and knowing we were legally married would give her some peace of mind.

Four years later, there was a child on the way.

Dad lived long enough to hold Kelly in his arms. After his passing, I became the boss. I felt orphaned and overwhelmed. The shoes were too big to fill, but I did my best. It was never the same without him, but I still loved what I did. I had a reason to get up in the morning. I had a purpose. I felt no need to justify the life I’d chosen to Sheila’s mother.

Sheila and I were both surprised when Fiona started seeing someone.

His name was Marcus Kingston, and while his first wife was still somewhere out in California, his second had died eight years earlier when some yahoo in a souped-up Civic ran a red light and broadsided her Lincoln. Marcus had been an importer of clothing and other goods, but had recently wound up his business when Fiona met him at a gallery opening in Darien. He’d spent a career mixing with the well-off and well connected, just the kind of people Fiona liked to be associated with.

When they decided, four years ago, to get married, Marcus sold his Norwalk house and Fiona put her place in Darien on the market. They went in together on a luxury town house that overlooked Long Island Sound.

Sheila’s theory was that Fiona woke up one morning and thought, Do I want to live the rest of my life alone? I had to admit that it had never occurred to me that Fiona might have any emotional needs. The woman put up such a chilly and independent front that one could be forgiven for thinking that she didn’t need people. But beneath that icy exterior was someone who was very lonely.

Marcus came along at the right time for her.

Sheila and I had wondered, on more than one occasion, whether Marcus’s motivations were slightly more complicated. He, too, had been on his own, and it made sense that he might want to wake up in the morning with someone next to him. But we also knew that Marcus had not sold his business for what he’d hoped to get, and that a sizable portion of his income still went to his first wife in Sacramento. Fiona, who’d been so careful-I might be inclined to say “tight”-with her money for so many years, appeared to have no problem spending it on Marcus. She’d even bought him a sailboat, which he moored in the Darien harbor.

Marcus still did some consulting here and there for importers who valued his expertise and connections. He dined out a night or two a week with these people, and liked to brag about how the business world just wouldn’t let him rest. Sheila and I had, privately, observed that he could be a bit of a blowhard, an asshole, frankly. But Fiona appeared to love him, and seemed happier with him in her life than she had been before he showed up.

They visited a lot so Fiona could see her grandchild. I could find plenty of reasons to dislike Fiona, but there was no question that she did adore Kelly. She took her shopping, to the movies, to Manhattan to visit museums and attend Broadway shows. Fiona even endured the occasional trip to the Toys “R” Us in Times Square.

“Where was this woman when I was a kid?” Sheila had asked me more than once.

Fiona and I maintained a kind of truce through these years. She didn’t like me, and I didn’t care much for her, but we remained civil. There was no out-in-the-open warfare.

That pretty much ended with Sheila’s accident.

After that, there was no holding back. Fiona blamed me. If I knew Sheila had a drinking problem, why hadn’t I done something about it? Why hadn’t I spoken to Fiona about it? Why hadn’t I forced Sheila into a program? What was I thinking, letting her drive around half the state of Connecticut, when she might very well have been under the influence?

And how often had she been drunk like that with Kelly-their granddaughter, for Christ’s sake-in the car?

“How could you not have known?” Fiona asked me at the funeral. “How the hell could you not have seen the signs?”

“There were no signs,” I told her, dazed and unhappy. “Not really.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’d say if I were you, too,” she shot back at me. “That’s what you have to believe, isn’t it? Gets you off the hook. But believe me, Glen, there had to have been signs. You just had your head too far up your ass to notice.”

“Fiona,” Marcus said, trying to pull her away.

But she wouldn’t stop. “You think she just decided one night, Hey, I think I’ll become an alcoholic and get plastered and fall asleep at the wheel in the middle of an off-ramp? You think someone just does that all of a sudden?”

“I suppose you saw something,” I said, stung by her fury. “ You never miss a trick.”

She blinked. “How was I supposed to see anything? I didn’t live with her. I wasn’t there with her seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. But you were. You’re the one who was in a position to see something, and in a position to do something about it when you did. You let us down. You let Kelly down. But most of all, you let Sheila down.”

People were staring at us. If it had been Marcus saying these things, I would have decked him. But that wasn’t an option with Fiona. But maybe the reason I so badly wanted to do it was because I knew she was right.

If Sheila’d had a drinking problem, surely I’d have seen something. How could I not have known? Had there been signs? Had there been warnings I’d chosen to ignore? Was it because I didn’t want to face the fact that Sheila was going through some kind of difficulties? Sure, Sheila liked a drink, like everyone else did. On special occasions. Lunch with her friends. Family get-togethers. We’d been known to kill off a couple of bottles of wine at home when Kelly was staying over with Fiona and Marcus in Darien. I even caught her one time when her foot slipped on the carpet as we headed upstairs on one such occasion.

But those couldn’t have been signs of something more serious. Or was I just kidding myself? Did I not want to see the truth?

Fiona was right: A woman didn’t just decide one night to get blind drunk and set off in her Subaru.

Three nights after Sheila’s death, I quietly tore the house apart after Kelly had gone to bed. If Sheila had been a closet drinker, she’d have been hiding liquor somewhere. If not in the house, then the garage, or the shed out back where we kept the lawnmower and rusted, old garden chairs.

I searched everywhere and came up with nothing.

So then I talked to her friends. Everyone who knew her. To Belinda, for starters.

“Okay, once, at lunch,” Belinda recalled, “Sheila had one and a half Cosmos and she got a little tipsy. And another time-George just about had a fit when he found us, he’s such a tight-ass-we smoked up. I had a couple of joints and we kind of mellowed out one evening when we were having a girls-only night. It was just a bit of fun. But she never really lost it, and any time she’d anything more than one drink she insisted on calling herself a cab. She had good sense. She was a smart girl. It doesn’t make any sense to me, either, what happened, but I guess we never know what someone else is going through, do we?”

Sally Diehl, from the office, had a hard time making sense of it, too. “But I had this cousin once-well, I still do-and she had a coke habit like you wouldn’t believe, Glen, but what was really unbelievable was how well she’d kept it hidden for so long, until one day, the cops came into her house and busted her. No one had any idea. Sometimes-and I’m not saying this was the case with Sheila-but sometimes, like, you just don’t know anything about people that you see every day.”

So it seemed there were two possibilities. Either Sheila had a drinking problem and was extremely good at hiding it, or Sheila had a drinking problem and I wasn’t good at picking up the signals.

I supposed there was a third possibility. Sheila did not have a drinking problem, and did not get behind the wheel drunk. For that possibility to be true, all the toxicology reports had to be wrong.

There wasn’t a shred of evidence to suggest they were.

In the days after Sheila’s death, as I struggled to make sense of something that made no sense at all, I tracked down students from the course she’d been taking. Turned out she never even went to class that evening, although she had shown up for all the other sessions. Her teacher, Allan Butterfield, said Sheila was the top student in the all-adult class.

“She had a real reason to be there,” he told me over a beer at a road-house down the street from the school. “She said to me, ‘I’m doing this for my family, for my husband and my daughter, to make our business stronger.’ ”

“When did she say that to you?” I’d asked.

He thought a moment. “A month ago?” He tapped the table with his index finger. “Right here. Over a couple of beers.”

“Sheila had a couple of beers here with you?” I asked.

“Well, I had a couple, maybe even three.” Allan’s face was flushed. “But Sheila, actually, I think she was having one. Just a glass.”

“You did this often with Sheila? Have a beer after class?”

“No, just the once,” he said. “She always wanted to get home in time to give her daughter a kiss good night.”

The way the police figured it, Sheila had skipped her class that night to drink away her evening somewhere. They never found out where she’d gone to do it. A check of area bars didn’t turn up any sightings of her, and no area liquor stores remembered selling her any booze that night. All of which meant, of course, nothing.

She could have sat in the car for hours drinking stuff she’d bought at another time, in another town.

I asked the police several times if there was any chance there’d been a mistake, and each time they told me toxicology reports didn’t lie. They provided copies. Sheila had a blood-alcohol level of 0.22. For a woman of Sheila’s size-about 140 pounds-that worked out to about eight drinks.

“I don’t just blame you for not picking up the signals,” Fiona fumed, at the funeral when Kelly was out of earshot. “I blame you for making her turn to drink. You swept her off her feet, no doubt about it, with your common touch, but over the years she was never able to stop thinking about the life she could have had. A better life, a richer life, the kind you’d never be able to give her. And it wore her down.”

“She told you this?” I said.

“She didn’t have to,” she snapped. “I just knew.”

“Fiona, honestly,” Marcus said, in a rare moment that made me quite like the guy. “Dial it down.”

“He needs to hear this, Marcus. And I may not have it in me to tell him later.”

“I doubt that,” I said.

“If you’d given her the kind of life she deserved, she’d never have had to drown her sorrows,” she said.

“I’m taking Kelly home,” I said. “Goodbye, Fiona.”

But like I said, she loved her granddaughter.

And Kelly loved her in return. And Marcus, too, to a degree. They doted on her. For Kelly’s sake, I tried to put aside my animosity toward Fiona. I was still reeling from the news that-evidently-Ann Slocum was dead, when I heard a car pull in to the driveway. I eased back the curtain and saw Marcus behind the wheel of his Cadillac. Fiona sat next to him.

“Shit,” I said. Before Sheila died, Kelly would stay at their town house one weekend out of six. If I’d been informed that this was one of those weekends, I’d certainly forgotten. I was confused. Neither Kelly nor I had seen Fiona or Marcus since the funeral. I had spoken to Fiona a few times on the phone, but only until Kelly had picked up the extension. Each time, Fiona made it clear she could barely be civil to me. Her contempt for me was like a buzz over the phone line.

I bounded up the stairs and poked my head into Kelly’s room. She was still asleep.

“Hey, kiddo,” I said.

She rolled over in bed and opened one eye, then the other. “What is it?”

“Grandmother alert. Fiona and Marcus are here.”

She sat bolt upright in bed. “They are? ”

“Did you know they were coming today?”

“Uhhh…”

“Because I sure didn’t know. You better get moving, kiddo.”

“I kind of forgot all about it.”

“Did you know?”

“I might, sort of.”

I gave her a look.

“I might have been talking to Grandma on Skype,” she confessed. “And I might have said it would be okay to come out and see me, but I didn’t say an actual day. I don’t think.”

“Like I said, you better get moving.”

Kelly slithered out from under the covers just as the doorbell rang. I left her to get herself dressed and went down to answer the door.

Fiona was up front, ramrod stiff and stone-faced. Marcus hovered just behind her, looking uncomfortable.

“Glen,” she said. Her voice could cut ice.

“Hey, Glen,” Marcus attempted. “How’s it going?”

“This is a surprise,” I said.

“We came to see Kelly,” Fiona said. “To see how she’s doing.” Her tone implied she doubted my daughter was doing well.

“Was this one of those weekends?”

“Do I need it to be one of ‘those weekends’ to see my granddaughter?”

“We might not have been home. And I’d hate for you to come for nothing.” This sounded reasonable to me, but Fiona flushed.

Marcus cleared his throat. “We thought we’d chance it.”

I stepped back to give them room to come inside. “You’ve been talking to Kelly over the Internet?” I asked Fiona.

“We’ve had some chats,” Fiona said. “I’m very worried about her. I can just imagine what she’s going through. When Sheila lost her father, she was older than Kelly, but she still took it so very hard.”

“The thruway was a son of a bitch,” Marcus said, still trying to cut through the tension. “Seems like they’re ripping up the roads all over the place.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They do that.”

“Look,” he said, “I told Fiona, you know, maybe this isn’t such a great idea, just showing up without calling or-”

“Marcus, do not apologize for me. There’s something I want to discuss with you, Glen,” Fiona said, in a tone MacArthur might have used when he got the Japanese to surrender.

“What’s that?”

“Kelly was telling me, during our Skype chat, that things aren’t going very well for her at school.”

“Kelly’s doing fine. Her grades are even a little better than last year.”

“I’m not talking about her grades. I’m talking about her social situation.”

“What about it?”

“I understand the other children are being horrible to her.”

“It hasn’t been an easy time for her.”

“Yes, well, I wouldn’t think so, considering that the boy who died in that accident was a student at Kelly’s school. She’s being tormented. That’s not a good environment for the child.”

“She told you about the kids calling her Boozer.”

“She did. So you do know.”

“Of course I know.”

“I guess I thought, if you knew, you would have done something about it.”

I felt that familiar prickling at the back of my neck. I didn’t want to get into this with her, but couldn’t let her get away with it. “I’m doing something about it, Fiona. Rest easy.”

“Are you moving her to another school?”

“Fiona, she only told me about this last night. I don’t know what it was like where you went to school, but in Milford the schools aren’t open on weekends. But I’ll be getting in touch with the principal first thing Monday morning.”

Fiona glared at me a moment, then looked away. When she met my eyes again, she seemed to have made an effort to soften her look. “I had an idea that might preclude you from having to do that, Glen.”

“What might that be?”

“Marcus and I talked about the possibility of Kelly going to school in Darien.”

He gave me another uncomfortable look. It seemed clear this idea had not originated with him.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

She nodded, as though she anticipated my reaction. “I can understand your reluctance. But let’s look at the situation objectively. All the stress Kelly is being subjected to now can’t be good for her academic performance. If she were in another school, where the other students don’t know her situation, or that other boy, it would be a fresh start for her.”

“It’ll pass,” I said.

“And,” she continued, ignoring me, “there are several schools within a few miles of our place that come very highly recommended. Their test scores are far superior to the results being achieved in the public schools. Even if Kelly had not suffered such a tragedy, were not being subjected to this harassment at her school, it would be an alternative worth considering. These are good, solid institutions with impeccable credentials. Many of Fairfield County’s more prominent families have enrolled their children in these schools.”

“I’m sure they can afford them,” I said.

Fiona shook her head. “Money’s not a problem, Glen. I’ll look after any tuition-related expenses.”

I thought I glimpsed something in Marcus’s face at that moment. I told Fiona, “I think it would be a bit much for Kelly to commute from here to Darien every day for school.”

She smiled slyly at me. “Kelly would be with us through the week, of course, and back here with you on weekends. We’ve already been talking to a designer, someone Marcus knows, about making over the room Kelly stays in when she sleeps over now. She’d have a place for her computer, a desk where she could do her homework, and-”

“You’re not taking her away from me,” I said bluntly.

“Not at all,” Fiona said, feigning offense. “I can’t believe you’d think such a thing. I’m trying to help you, Glen. You and Kelly. Believe me, I know how hard it is to raise a child on your own. I’ve been there. I understand what it must be like for you, trying to juggle work and being a father. You’re probably only just getting back into the swing of things, but you wait and see. You’re on a job site, outside of town, you’re waiting for a delivery or an inspection or a client-I don’t know, I don’t pretend to understand what you do-and suddenly realize you have to be at the school to pick Kelly up.”

“I’ll have to roll with it,” I said.

Fiona reached out and touched one of my folded arms, quite a gesture for her. “Glen-I know you and I, we haven’t always seen eye to eye. But what I’m proposing here, it’s in Kelly’s best interest. Surely even you can see that. I’m trying to give her every possible opportunity.”

The thing was, it wasn’t an entirely terrible idea, if I could swallow my pride about who’d be paying for it-there was no way I could afford to send Kelly to a private school here or anywhere else. And if I believed Fiona’s motives were genuine, I might have been willing to entertain the proposal. But I couldn’t help but feel this was an attempt on her part to drive a wedge between my own daughter and me. With Sheila gone, Fiona wanted control over her granddaughter.

“I told you,” Marcus said to his wife. “I told you this would come across as too pushy.”

“This really doesn’t involve you, Marcus,” she said. “Kelly is my granddaughter, not yours. There’s no blood connection.”

He looked my way, as if to say, I know what you’re going through, pal.

“I am involved,” Marcus insisted. “Kelly would be coming to live with us. ” He glanced at me again and clarified. “Through the week. And I’m okay with that, but don’t say it doesn’t involve me, goddamn it. Don’t say that for one second.”

“Kelly’s staying with me,” I said.

“Well,” Fiona said, not accepting defeat, “clearly you need some time to think about it. And of course, we’ll want to see what Kelly has to say. She might like the idea very much.”

“It’s my call,” I reminded her.

“Of course it is.” She patted my arm again. “Where is the little princess, anyway? I was thinking we could at least take her on a little excursion for the afternoon-maybe to the Stamford mall. Get her a new winter coat or something.”

“I think Kelly should stay at home today,” I said. “The thing is, something’s happened, something I haven’t even had a chance to tell Kelly about yet, and I don’t know how she’s going to react, but I think she’s going to be very upset.”

“What?” Marcus was frowning. Probably anticipating his wife lighting into me again, whatever the problem.

“You know Sheila’s friend Ann? She has a daughter named Emily who’s friends with Kelly?”

Fiona nodded. To Marcus, she said, “You remember her. She had the purse party here.”

Marcus looked blank.

“I can’t believe you don’t remember. She was a real dish,” Fiona said with more than a hint of disapproval. To me, “What about her?”

“We saw her only last night. Kelly had gone over for a sleepover. But Kelly called me to pick her up early, she wasn’t having a good time, and sometime after that-”

“Daddy!”

The three of us turned our heads toward the stairs as Kelly screamed.

“ Daddy, come here! Quick! ”

I took the stairs two at a time and was in her bedroom a good ten seconds before either Fiona or Marcus could get there. Kelly was at her desk, still in her yellow pajamas, perched on the edge of her chair, one hand on the mouse, the other pointing at the screen. She was on one of the sites where she chats with her friends.

“Emily’s mom,” she said. “It’s about Emily’s mom-”

“I was going to tell you,” I said, getting my arm around her and giving Marcus and Fiona a look that said Get out of here. They retreated. “I just found out myself, honey-”

“What happened?” There were tears in Kelly’s eyes. “Did she just die?”

“I don’t know. I mean, yeah, I guess she did. When I called their house this morning-”

Kelly squirmed in my arms. “I told you not to call!”

“It’s okay, honey. It doesn’t matter. I thought it was Emily’s mom who answered, but it was her aunt, her mother’s sister. She told me that Mrs. Slocum had died.”

“But I saw her. Last night. She wasn’t dead then!”

“I know, sweetheart. It’s a shock.”

Kelly thought a moment. “What should I do? Should I call Emily?”

“Maybe later, okay? Emily and her dad, they need some time alone.”

“I feel all weird.”

“Yeah.”

We sat there for what seemed a very long time. I held on to her, cradling her in my arms as she cried.

“My mom, and now Emily’s mom,” she said softly. “Maybe I’m, like, a bad luck charm or something.”

“Don’t say that, sweetheart. Never say that. It isn’t true.”

When she stopped sobbing, I knew I needed to broach the subject of our visitors. “Your grandmother and Marcus want to take you out for the afternoon.”

Kelly sniffed. “Oh.”

“And I think your grandmother wants you to go to school in Darien. Any idea why she might want that?”

She nodded. She didn’t look very surprised. “I guess I might have told her I hate my school.”

“Online,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, now your grandmother wants you to live with her through the week and go to school in Darien, come back here to me on weekends.”

She slipped her arms tight around me. “I don’t think I want to do that.” A pause. “But at least, if I did, the kids there wouldn’t know anything about me, they wouldn’t know what Mom had done.”

We held each other for another minute.

“If Emily’s mom had a disease or something, like Evian flu, will I catch it? Because I was in her bedroom?”

“I don’t think someone could come down with the flu and die from it in just a few hours,” I said. “A heart attack, maybe. Something like that. But not something you could catch. And it’s avian flu, by the way.”

“You can’t catch a heart attack?”

“No.” I looked her in the eye.

“She doesn’t look even a little bit sick in the video.”

That stopped me. “What?”

“On my phone. She looks fine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I was in the closet, I had my phone ready to take video of Emily when she opened the door. I told you that, Daddy.”

“You didn’t tell me you shot video of her mother. I thought when Mrs. Slocum came in you put your phone away.”

“Like, pretty soon after.”

“You still have it?” I asked.

Kelly nodded.

“Show me.”